Tamagotchi Progress – Week 1

I began the week by focusing on my story. What was going on here? What were my options? I went to town with post it notes and dumped out my brain.

Then I went back to my initial inspiration – tamagotchi. There are a few mini games you play to keep your character happy and alive, and that’s essentially the entire game. So I would start my game in the same way, then have the character be jolted from its home by getting disconnected from the internet. Once it has escaped from its “cage,” it explores its neighbors, until it happens across another character it wants to meet. Being offline, it has no way to communicate with someone online. It goes back online to ‘message’ this thing of interest.

I still had to work out the ending, but this gave me more than enough of a frame to continue development.

I added in placeholder for the starting scenes – “creating a profile” , introducing the “get followers” and “get likes” minigames to feed your tamagotchi – as well as setting up the structure for the scene where the character wanders around to observe other characters.

There were a few technical challenges to figure out. First, I had to figure out how the mini game structure fit in to my scene based structure. I decided to keep them separate from scenes, so they are self contained, with their own knowledge of when they need to be enabled and disabled. So for example – if I include followGame() in a scenes code, its waiting to detect a click to open the game, as well as one to close it. For now this is fine, though there is still jankiness in detecting exit/entrance clicks because it uses mouseIsPressed rather than the mousePressed function.

For the wanderer scene, I had to design a basic box that was actually a sprite so that I could utilize p5 play’s built in collision detection. For that, I first made a prototype, then I integrated it in to my code, ensuring I got the positioning just right.

In making these scenes, I realized that I needed to focus on a few key things:

1. Prototyping options for the likes game
2. Prototyping options for the followers game
3. Getting a sense of the visuals for the wandering scene

wandering scene – character concepts (I need 10+ more of these)Give a window to a ‘user’ playing the tamagotchiallude to someone tapping/scrolling the screen

Overall I’d give myself a 80% for the week. I would have really loved to have either fleshed out the rest of the story or the minigames, but I’m happy I made solid progress on the storyboard. My next two weeks should now be: